It completely fails me, I’ll admit, how one could dispute the basic logic of the award winning poet Matthew Shenoda. ‘The way I look at it, it’s really quite simple. There’s a lot of suffering in the world, and it’s real. And if we who are in positions of privilege to create art . . . if we don’t engage in reality, in the struggle that people face on a daily basis, in my opinion we have fundamentally forsaken a major part of the human race.’
Yet, in an environment where ‘art for art’s sake’ has become de rigueur, it is increasingly rare to hear such sentiment. Entire generations of nihilists and postmodernists have spent their careers frantically fleeing any simulacrum of social responsibility.
Not Matthew Shenoda. A couple of hours before he read his poetry to UT students on March 22’mdash;courtesy of Quilt, our campus literary magazine’mdash;he agreed to sit down with me and clarify his philosophy of poetry as well as art in general. Explaining that the ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy is an extension of the notion of ‘high art,’ he pointed out that ‘high art comes from what I consider to be a classist position and often times a racist position’ of privilege. While a classist and racist status quo prescribes billions to suffering and despair, ‘high art’ attempts to divorce itself from its social role and thus abandons suffering humanity to the everyday horrors of the new world order.
In opposition to this hedonistic position of escape, Shenoda’s poetry is a way to engage reality and galvanize action. First and foremost, he made clear that ‘the artist has a responsibility to society’ and that ‘there is a wonderful nexus between art and activism.’ In other words, the artist, by virtue of being an artist, should be an activist as well. The best art, always coming from the grassroots, is constantly ‘complicating the conversations that need to be had.’
Later that night I found that Shenoda’s poetry engages reality with perhaps the most important conversation that needs to be had, that which he refers to as ‘rehumanization.’ When barely a couple of thousand American lives were lost in 2001, there was immediate identification on a personal level with the dead’mdash;so much so that many were willing to declare war on an entire region of the world! Yet estimations of over one million dead Iraqis’mdash;that’s over 333 times the amount of dead Americans!’mdash;due to two decades of U.S. aggression can be treated as a statistical abstraction in the press and discussed with a remarkable detachment among Americans.
‘Rehumanization’ means precisely that: reiterating the human spirit of those that have been dehumanized ever since colonialism. American lives are not worth more than Arab lives; Arabs are of the same fundamental human condition, harbor dreams and hopes, potentials and talents just as any other people do. It is the task of Shenoda’s poetry to beautifully bring this out, initiating the conversation of ‘rehumanization.’ Students that attended Quilt‘s event were treated to his ‘Where We Come From’ which draws on his roots in the Arab World: ‘in places where the list of murdered / surpasses the dead by natural causes / hunger is not the birthright of children’ and ‘semi-automatic machine fire / barreling through / freedom for hire / our homelands becoming / first world garbage dumps.’
But despite all the injustice that it is the artist’s duty to address, it doesn’t have to be done in a negative way. ‘After all,’ Shenoda related, ‘to try and make the world a better place is a positive thing.’ An underlying optimism is very central to his poetry. In his words, this is because ‘it’s not just about opposition; it’s about love, love for human beings.’ When trying to engage reality and the human spirit, it can be done many ways, and Shenoda explicated that ‘it is possible in art to talk about horrible things in beautiful ways.’
The only thing inviolable is that the artist fulfils their responsibility to society. Nearly 50 years ago, African independence hero S’eacute;kou Tour’eacute; warned that ‘there is no place . . . for the artist or for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with and completely at one with the people in the great battle . . . of suffering humanity.’ Shenoda, self described as ‘very anti-nihilistic,’ emphatically agrees, for he has secured his place.
If the media can, in his words, ‘pacify a populace from becoming critical thinkers,’ then it is art’s duty to have the opposite effect. The poetry of Matthew Shenoda does just that. The closing passage from his poem ‘Enough’ may serve as a yardstick for any contemporary poetry. It combines all the essentials: critically engaging the plight of suffering humanity, initiating crucial conversation and inspiring action while exuding a deep love for human beings in a beautiful way.
‘The blood of the dead is not negotiable / the wine of the wicked not sweet / I am living in America in this place that has spit on every- / thing I know to love.’